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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Hi Michael,

This is the first I've heard of the softcover platform.

After some research it looks like it was posted on HN about 2 years ago, but there's only a handful of books posted on the platform compared to let's say leanpub who has a few thousand.

Since you just posted this book on softcover, it's safe to say you're still happy using it, but why aren't more authors choosing your platform?

You would think after 2 years it would have gained traction, especially considering how big your reach is from previously successful tutorials and books.

I'm a content author and softcover looks nice. My main issue with leanpub is that all sales data is anonymous and you can't obtain e-mail addresses of your readers and your platform seems to solve that.

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Thanks for the note. Softcover is absolutely amazing for my purposes, but at this point we think the educational market is more promising than the market for self-publishing tools, so that's what we're focusing on now. This was always part of our plan; I personally needed Softcover for the reasons you mention, but it was an open question whether it would take off as a standalone platform or whether we would end up focusing on making our own products.

A happy but unintended side-effect of making a platform is that it dramatically lowers the barrier to collaborating with other authors, and I'm currently working with several other people on more advanced and varied Learn Enough tutorials. This sort of collaborative publishing (with full control over the publication pipeline) would be effectively impossible without Softcover.

I see, thanks for the reply.

So basically you've been spending your time and resources on creating the books rather than promoting the platform?

I will certainly reach out to you in the future because having access to e-mails is enough to move me off leanpub. In leanpub's defense they are a great bunch of people. I've had a number of conversations with their developers and they are always on the ball. Also never had any technical issues with their platform as an author.

Hmm, both services look nice but don't appear to support Sphinx. Would that be a possibility at some point?

The new design of the "Learn Enough" series looks very nice. Will Softcover.io also take over this new design for its books?

I used softcover for writing http://books.aidanf.net/learn-swift

The software is awesome for the purposes of writing the book. The reason I didn't go with softcover as a selling platform is that the new EU VAT rules came in and as a result I had to use someone that supported those new VAT collection rules.

So I ended up using softcover to generate the ebooks and html, but using gumroad (and leanpub) to sell them. So it's totally feasible to use softcover for writing your book but self-host the resulting html and keep control of your sales data etc.

Does this only effect you if you're collecting income from EU or would it be a problem to even accept payments from people living in EU?

In theory, if you are selling to customers in the EU you are supposed to collect VAT from your EU customers and make the appropriate VAT return to the VATMOSS authorities. Or else stop selling to EU customers.

In practice, if you're based outside of the EU then you can probably just ignore these regulations (many smaller US sellers seem to be taking this approach). It's hard to imagine the EU tax authorities chasing you down.

Ok thanks. It sounds like this should be something your payment provider (softcover via proxy through Stripe or whatever they use) would take care of for you.

Other platforms that sell items globally tend to charge EU customers more which probably account for the VAT increase, but in the end gives the author roughly the same amount per sale?

Yes, a lot of sales platforms now handle EU VAT. I've used Gumroad, Sendowl and Leanpub and they all handle the EU VAT problem. In each case the author sets a price. They then detect if the customer is in an EU country and apply the VAT rate for that country, adding it on to the customers total. So the author gets the same amount for each sale, but the customers pay different amounts depending on which country they are in.

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